Chapter Text
It should have been an easy mission. I should have been in and out within a couple cycles. I should have been more careful.
I should have brought ART with me.
No, that wouldn't do.
As I sit on a transport likely headed towards Company territory, I think about what went wrong.
Risk assessment had been next to useless for years at this point. Always a little too high, or a little too low. Usually too high. I didn't think much of it until Gurathin told me how "cute" it was that I could rely on ART so much. That I must feel so "secure" around it.
Then I started paying attention. Risk assessment had been slowly creeping up since I joined ART's crew. When it isn't around, risk assessment goes crazy until I'm back near the fuck-off big warship that has made me soft.
And that's exactly what I was. A SecUnit who has gone soft. That's dangerous. I rely on ART too much. I needed to toughen up, sharpen my skills and I needed to do it without ART. During a break between missions, I took a job with PSUMNT and didn't tell anyone.
It should have been an easy job for me. Long story short, the humans I was assigned to help are all fine, but I'm stuck headed back to the Company with my only option being to wait for the corporate hostiles to trip up and make a mistake.
You really fucked this one up, Murderbot.
The only upside is that we haven't left the system yet. If the humans I was assigned to help came after me… No, why would they? Here I am again, expecting someone else to save me. I have to be the one to save myself.
And, well, options are looking grim.
Based on their security protocols, these people are prepared for bringing rogue secunits on board. The ship's systems are protected from my usual route of hacking, so having the ship think that I'm part of its own security team is out of the question.
Considering the secunit grade restraints I'm currently in, the fact that they didn't even try a combat override module, and the manner in which they caught me, I'm betting that they were after me specifically. It's not unheard of for corporates to go around hunting for rogue secunits, especially with the recent uptick in distribution of a certain governor module hack. However, most rogue secunits have not very publicly been confirmed to no longer have a functioning override port. Just me.
Which not only leads me to believe that my situation is fucked up beyond all reason, but also that there is a leak in PSUMNT's system. And I won't get to tell anyone unless I manage to get myself off this ship. Preferably before entering the wormhole.
It takes longer than I'm used to, since I can't just pretend to be a part of the ship's systems, but I am eventually able to hack into lower grade systems on the ship. By applying a little bit of subtle misdirection and mischief, I might slow the ship down. I may not have access to the engines yet, but I've learned a handful of things about humans over the years. If I screw with enough systems and make them angry enough, they might get antsy and give me an opening. I set the lighting to a frequency that causes migraines in most humans, switch the drink machine's systems so that caffeine is distributed in decaffeinated drinks only, and set the speaker system to whine at an obnoxious frequency that most humans can't hear, but will cause lasting damage, eventually.
We're still a couple of cycles from the wormhole, but if I'm lucky, my meddling will delay that enough for me to gain better system access.
***---***
We're almost to the wormhole. There have been multiple altercations on the ship due to some convenient misunderstandings I may have orchestrated, and for a brief beautiful moment, I thought there might be a mutiny. Unfortunately, they all agreed to settle whatever argument they were having after they drop off the dangerous rogue secunit at the Company. The whole thing did cause some delays though, which would have be useful if trying to get system access from the ship didn't feel like bashing my head against a wall.
Without my meddling, we would have been in the wormhole 38 hours ago. I bought myself time, but for what? No one who cares about me (ugh) knows where I am, and I can't help myself this time. I have gotten out of some tight situations before, but this is looking dire.
I try yet another workaround in the ship's systems and hit another wall. Whoever designed this system knew what they were up against.
I'm about out of options. There has to be a way to break the system, but I don't know if I can do it from within a holding cell with my main feed closely monitored. It doesn't help that I have to route every action I take through another system so that I'm not discovered.
I've been sitting in the same position for four cycles, curled up in the middle of a holding cell, eyes closed, trying to seem like I'm in shutdown, but I almost jump visibly when I receive a ping. For a brief millisecond, I wonder if someone on the ship is trying to contact me for some reason, but then I register where the ping came from.
It's ART's comm. I breathe a barely noticeable sigh of relief, and risk assessment plummets to a little below what I'd expect from sitting captured on a corporate ship.
Then my brain catches up with me, and I'm angry. This is exactly what I didn't want. I needed to prove I could do a mission without ART's help, and here it is interfering again. I'd be pissed off if I weren't so happy to have it here.
I send a ping back, devoid of emotion, and transmit location data and everything I know about the ship and the soon to be dead Targets.
I see the ship's communications array light up a few moments later, and I listen in on incoming messages.
"You have a member of my crew on board your ship, a Secunit. I will request that you hand it over." The voice sounds like Captain Seth, but could easily be ART imitating him.
The captain of the ship I'm on taps into the comms. "You can request all you like, the piece of equipment in question is not yours. You have no claim to it." If the captain were smart, he would have denied I was even here. He must be feeling cocky.
An alarm on the bridge goes off. "Let me make myself clearer," says a far more menacing imitation of Captain Seth's voice. "You will hand over the Secunit, or you will face consequences."
Looking in on the bridge cameras, the captain whispers something to another human that doesn't register on audio. While the captain stares down the facsimile image of Seth on the communications screen, the other crew member makes their way out of the room.
"I'll have you know that if you are threatening me and my crew with violence-" The captain is cut off.
"I do not make threats," comes ART's villain voice, just barely convincing enough to still be Seth. "I'm just telling you what I'm going to do."
Then I get a direct message from ART that just says, Brace for impact.